I do two types of work, painting on walls, and pursuing artworks exploring and promoting 'sustainable development' issues.

I like the challenge
of working out what wall owners would like painted on their walls. I like the pressure of people caring about the
result, passions on the street are stronger than in the art gallery. I like the scale
- being dwarfed by my canvas, the size of the brushes and paint tins, the textures,
and the physical exercise. I'm not generally fussed about what I'm asked to
paint, I can't remember the last time I didn't like what I was asked for.

Its an old habit as well, one of my first memories is of coming home from school
having learnt to write my name, and being so proud of my new found skill I wrote
it up on the lounge doors, and then drew a traffic jam aound the bottom of the
room for good luck. The feedback to my
work that day was complicated, not least because I spelt Tom backwards.

I've now been self employed painting
murals for 27 years. For town halls such as twin exchange town murals or local
history promotions, in school playgrounds working with children, in nightclubs,
shops, restaurants, youth clubs, or building site barriers. Mostly public but occassionally I
do residential work in bedrooms or swimming pools.

My work in
schools used to be paid for through playground improvement funding - the costs
of a mural being tiny compared to other playground upgrades. But increasingly I
was asked to run art workshops with educational gain, a fascinating and complex
area, at the time when I began home schooling my children doubly focusing my
attention.

I dug ideas of 'sustainable development' as soon as I read them in the Rio Earth
Summit 1994. From the idea that everyone
should creatively address all aspects of their lives to make a more just and clean world,
that since the world's resources are finite therefore they should be shared
equitably, to the idea that if everyone makes continuous small changes to their lifestyle we may just avert ecogeddon without great inconvenience. But what kind of cultural input does it take to persuade people to adjust their habits, and what are the alternatives?
To help explore these issues I did an MA at Manchester part time looking at how
culture might be used to propagate the aims and objectives of Bradford Local Agenda 21.

The question I can hear people asking is - 'but
how is his habit change art?' Well, we can do anything anytime, but we normally
shun our creative opportunities from breakfast to bed in favour of habit, fear and consumer
choice. If we can defy our habits, fears, and consumer choices we realise our creative potential and become
'artists of life', and if our new choices are more CO2 neutral we are
'environmental artists of life'.
However, our possibilities are limited, the sense and scale of what we can do only becomes
apparent when the reactions of environment and other people are considered/intervene.
(Beuysian thinking with a finishing twist of Sartre).

'Everyone needs to become an environmental artist if we are to
avoid ecogeddon' Tom Cousins 1997.

Apart from that I've got a BA
- Fine Art, Middlesex Poly, MA - Art as Environment, Manchester Met Uni,
a mural covered house, a vegetable patch, a blossoming collection of water butts
and solar cookers, and a nuclear family of 4.